Tech giants face UK ban over over terror, abuse videos
Social media firms could be banned from the UK if
they fail to stop users viewing or sharing terrorist content and combating
child sex abuse under new duty of care laws to be unveiled on Monday.
UK home secretary Sajid Javid is considering
draconian sanctions that would block errant firms' access to UK users, remove
them from search engines such as Google or allow named directors to be
prosecuted or fined for breaches of their duty of care, The Telegraph reported
Sunday.
The powers come on top of huge fines - set at a
proportion of the tech giants' turnover - that a new regulator would be able to
impose on companies that failed not only to prevent terrorist or child abuse
content appearing but also to take down any that does appear within a
prescribed timescale.
The UK government’s White Paper plans aim to put the
onus on firms to proactively find technological solutions to ensure terrorist
and child sex abuse content and activity never appears online.
Javid said: "Illegal terrorist content and
child sexual exploitation and abuse has absolutely no place in society - let
alone the internet - and it shocks me that it is still too readily available
online."
"Put simply, the tech companies have not done
enough to protect their users and stop this shocking content from appearing in
the first place."
